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Repetition is used a lot, lending a sense of unity and clarity. There’s not much of visual interest going on design-wise, but the attention is drawn to the images and video thumbnails that accompany the article headings, so it doesn’t seem particularly boring. Proximity is used to group stories within the same category and use of whitespace/margins allow for ease of reading.
The focus and priority is on the stories and drawing the reader in via images and headlines and conveys values like professionalism, traditionalism, and clarity. BBC News’ website is comparable to other news websites, especially NBC and AP News and is more organized and clear (in my opinion) that those of sites like CNN, Reuters, and Fox News. I think part of that might be that BBC tends to have a single section that spans the width of the page, while sites like Reuters have multiple columns going on.
I think one of the elements that makes BBC News feel more professional and trustworthy to me is the bottom of the home page. Many other reputable news sites have sponsored content at the bottom, not just standard ads but ones that are formatted in the clickbait style. However, BBC News does not have a section like this. Since I tend to associate the aforementioned ad style with clickbait, computer viruses, and tabloids, the absence of this sections makes BBC News feel more trustworthy and professional to me.
As we will discuss further in the next section, the font choice for BBC News was specifically developed for clarity and accessibility, so it conveys both those values.
BBC’s overall mission statement (not just the news branch) is “to act in the public interest, serving all audiences through the provision of impartial, high-quality and distinctive output and services which inform, educate and entertain.” We can see this focus on impartiality in the website design, especially when comparing BBC News’ clean, professional, but perhaps not very exciting design (as seen in the previous images) with Fox News’ use of emphasis text like “DOXXING QUEEN” and splitting your attention across multiple panels (and having videos running instead of all thumbnails).
From this, we might think that BBC News’ values lie more in the aforementioned professionalism, clarity, and impartiality, while perhaps Fox News’ lean more towards passion, boldness, and decisiveness.
BBC News does a pretty good job with accessibility overall and in comparison to other news sites. One particularly thoughtful and interesting element is the font used throughout. BBC uses a font they developed called BBC Reith Sans, which was developed in consultation with a neuroscientist and readability tested on user groups composed of people with dyslexia, moderate to severe vision impairment, and people who didn’t fall into either of the aforementioned categories Source.
In the screen capture video below, we can see that we can navigate well with tab, shift + tab, and enter, including when we have the window minimized. The page also has a way to skip to the main content instead of going through all the options (labelled as “skip to main content” in the beginning of the video). The order in which the tabs are highlighted is intuitive and the highlighting is clear.
Here, we see that the tab highlights are also clear while in high contrast mode and we also show the use of the skip to main content feature. Background color, margins, and such all look good in high contrast mode.